Life and Times of Michael K Read online

  ‘This isn’t a prison,’ said the man. ‘Didn’t you hear the policeman tell you it isn’t a prison? This is Jakkalsdrif. This is a camp. Don’t you know what a camp is? A camp is for people without jobs. It is for all the people who go around from farm to farm begging for work because they haven’t got food, they haven’t got a roof over their heads. They put all the people like that together in a camp so that they won’t have to beg any more. You say why don’t I run away. But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we’ve got here? From soft beds like this and free wood and a man at the gate with a gun to stop the thieves from coming in the night to steal your money? Where do you come from that you don’t know these things?’

  K was silent. He did not understand who was being blamed.

  ‘You climb the fence,’ the man said, ‘and you have left your place of abode. Jakkalsdrif is your place of abode now. Welcome. You leave your place of abode, they pick you up, you are a vagrant. No place of abode. First time, Jakkalsdrif. Second time, Brandvlei. You want to go to Brandvlei, penal servitude, hard labour, brickfields, guards with whips? You climb the fence, they pick you up, it’s a second offence, you go to Brandvlei. Remember that. It’s your choice. Where do you want to go anyway?’ He dropped his voice. ‘You want to go to the mountains?’

  K did not know what he meant. The man slapped him on the leg. ‘Come out and join the party,’ he said. ‘You see them searching people at the gate? Searching for liquor. No liquor in the camp, by order. So come out and have a drink.’

  Thus K allowed himself to be led out to the group gathered around the guitar-player. The music stopped. ‘This is Michael,’ the man said. ‘He has come all the way to Jakkalsdrif for his holiday. Let’s make him welcome.’ K was pressed to sit down, offered wine out of a bottle wrapped in brown paper, and besieged with questions: Where did he come from? What was he doing in Prince Albert? Where had he been picked up? No one could understand why he should have left the city and come to this lonely part of the world where there was no work and where entire families had been turned off farms they had lived on for generations.

  ‘I was bringing my mother to live in Prince Albert,’ K tried to explain. ‘She was sick, her legs were giving her trouble. She wanted to live in the country, to get away from the rain. It was raining all the time where we lived. But she died on the way, in Stellenbosch, in the hospital there. So she never saw Prince Albert. She was born here.’

  ‘Poor lady,’ said a woman. ‘But haven’t you got Welfare in the Cape?’ She did not wait for K’s answer. ‘There is no Welfare here. This is our Welfare.’ She waved an arm to embrace the camp.

  K pressed on. ‘Then I worked on the railways,’ he said. ‘I helped to clear the line when there was a blockage. Then I came here.’

  There was a silence. Now I must speak about the ashes, thought K, so as to be complete, so as to have told the whole story. But he found that he could not, or could not yet. The man with the guitar began to pick out a new melody. K felt the attention of the group drift away from him to the music. ‘There is no Welfare in Cape Town either,’ he said. ‘The Welfare stopped.’ The tent next door glowed, lit from within by a candle; figures moved in silhouette against the walls larger than life. He reclined and stared up at the stars.

  ‘We’ve been in for five months now,’ said a voice beside him. It was the man from the hut. His name was Robert. ‘My wife, my children, three girls and a boy, my sister and her children. I had work near Klaarstroom, on a farm. I’d been there a long time, twelve years. Then suddenly there was no wool market. Then they started the quota system—only so much wool per farmer. Then they closed the one road to Oudtshoorn, then they closed the other one, then they opened them both, then they closed them for good. So one day he came to me, this farmer, and he said, “I’ve got to let you go. Too many mouths to feed, I can’t afford it.” “Where must I go?” I said: “You know there are no jobs.” “Sorry,” he said, “nothing personal, I just can’t afford it any more.” So he let me go, me with a family, and he kept on a man who had been there only a short time, a young man, single. Just one mouth to feed—he could afford that. I said to him, “I’ve got no work now, what can I afford?” Anyway, we packed everything and left; and on the road, I’m not lying, on the road the police picked us up, he had phoned them, they picked us up and that same night we were here in Jakkalsdrif behind the wire. “No fixed abode.” I said to them, “Last night I had a fixed abode, how do you know tonight I won’t have a fixed abode?” They said, “Where would you rather sleep, out in the veld under a bush like an animal or in a camp with a proper bed and running water?” I said, “Do I get a choice?” They said, “You get a choice and you choose Jakkalsdrif. Because we are not going to have people wandering around being a nuisance.” But I’ll tell you the real reason, I’ll tell you why they were so quick to pick us up. They want to stop people from disappearing into the mountains and then coming back one night to cut their fences and drive their stock away. Do you know how many men there are in this camp—young men?’ He leaned towards K and dropped his voice. ‘Thirty. You are thirty-one. And how many women and children and old people? Look around, count for yourself. So I ask you, where are the men who aren’t here with their families?’

  ‘I was in the mountains,’ said K. ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

  ‘But you ask any of these women where their menfolk are, they will say, “He has got a job, he sends me money every month,” or, “He ran away, he left me.” So who knows?’

  There was a long silence. A tiny light flashed across the heavens. K pointed. ‘A shooting star,’ he said.

  The next morning K went out to work. The Railways Administration had first call on the men from Jakkalsdrif, followed by the Prince Albert Divisional Council, followed by the local farmers. The truck came to fetch them at six-thirty, and by seven-thirty they were at work north of Leeu-Gamka, clearing undergrowth from the river-bed upstream and downstream from a railway bridge, digging holes and mixing cement for a security fence. The work was hard; by mid-morning K was flagging. The time in the mountains has turned me into an old man, he thought.

  Robert paused beside him. ‘Before you break your back, my friend,’ he said, ‘remember what they pay you. You get standard wage, one rand a day. I get one rand fifty because I have dependants. So don’t kill yourself. Go and take a pee. You’ve been in hospital, you’re not well.’

  Later, when the midday break came, he offered K one of his sandwiches and stretched out beside him in the shade of a tree. ‘Out of your five–six rand a week,’ he told him, ‘you have to provide your own food. The camp is just a place to sleep. The ACVV ladies—you saw them yesterday—they visit three times a week, but that is charity work for the children only. My wife has a job in the town three half-days a week as a domestic. She takes the baby with her and leaves the other children with my sister. So we bring in maybe twelve rand a week. From that we have to feed nine people, three grownups, six children. Other people have it harder. When there isn’t work, too bad, we sit behind the wire and tighten our belts.

  ‘Now the money you earn, there is only one place to spend it, that is Prince Albert. And when you go into a shop in Prince Albert, all of a sudden prices go up. Why? Because you are from the camp. They don’t want a camp so near their town. They never wanted it. They ran a big campaign against the camp at the beginning. We breed disease, they said. No hygiene, no morals. A nest of vice, men and women all together. The way they talked, there should be a fence down the middle of the camp, men on one side, women on the other, dogs to patrol it at night. What they would really like—this is my opinion—is for the camp to be miles away in the middle of the Koup out of sight. Then we could come on tiptoe in the middle of the night like fairies and do their work, dig their gardens, wash their pots, and be gone in the morning leaving everything nice and clean.

  ‘So I hear you ask who is in favour of the camp? I’ll tell you. First, the Railways. The Railways would like to have
a Jakkalsdrif every ten miles along the line. Second, the farmers. Because from a gang from Jakkalsdrif a farmer gets a day’s work blood cheap, and at the end of the day the truck fetches them and they are gone and he doesn’t have to worry about them or their families, they can starve, they can be cold, he knows nothing, it’s none of his business.’

  A short distance away, out of earshot, sat the gang foreman on a little folding stool. K watched him pour coffee out of his vacuum flask. His long flat fingers could not all find a place on the ear of the mug. With two fingers in the air he raised it and drank. Over the rim his eyes met K’s. What does he see? thought K. What am I to him? The foreman set down the mug, raised his whistle to his lips, and, still sitting, blew a long blast.

  Later that afternoon, while he was chopping at the roots of a thornbush, the same foreman came and stood behind him. Glancing under his arm, he saw the two black shoes and the rattan stick tapping idly in the dust, and felt himself trembling with the old nervousness. He went on chopping, but there was no strength in his arms. Only when the foreman moved off could he begin to collect himself.

  In the evening he was too tired to eat. He took his mattress outside and lay watching the stars appear one by one out of the violet sky. Then someone on the way to the latrines stumbled over him. There was a commotion, from which he retreated. Moving the mattress back to the hut, he lay on his bunk in the dark under the roof-plates.

  On Saturday they were paid and the commissary lorry came. On Sunday a pastor visited the camp to conduct a prayer service, after which the gates were thrown open till curfew time. K went to the service. Standing among the women and children, he joined in the singing. Then the pastor bent his head and prayed. ‘Let peace enter our hearts again, O Lord, and grant it to us to return to our homes cherishing bitterness against no man, resolved to live together in fellowship in Thy name, obeying Thy commandments.’ Afterwards he spoke to some of the old people, then climbed into the blue van that had waited for him at the gate and was driven off.

  Now they were free to go to Prince Albert, or visit friends, or simply take a walk in the veld. K saw a family of eight, the man and wife in their best sober black, the girls in pink and white dresses with white hats, the boys in grey suits and ties with their feet stuffed into shiny black shoes, set off down the long road to the town. Others followed: a band of girls, laughing, arm in arm; the man with the guitar together with his sister and his girlfriend. ‘Why don’t we go?’ suggested K to Robert. ‘Let the youngsters go if they want to,’ replied Robert. ‘What’s so special about Prince Albert on a Sunday? I’ve seen it before, it’s nothing to me. Go with them if you want to. Buy yourself a cool drink and sit outside the café and scratch your fleabites. There is nothing else to do. I say, if we are going to be in jail, let’s be in jail, let’s not pretend.’

  Nevertheless K left the camp. He strolled down the Jakkalsrivier till the wire and the huts and the pump were out of sight. Then he lay down in the warm grey sand with his beret over his face and fell asleep. He awoke sweating. He lifted the beret and squinted into the sun. Striking all the colours of the rainbow from his eyelashes, it filled the sky. I am like an ant that does not know where its hole is, he thought. He dug his hands into the sand and let it pour through his fingers over and over again.

  The moustache they had shaved off at the hospital was beginning to cover his lip again. Still, he found it hard to relax with Robert and his family around the fire where the eyes of the children were continually upon him. There was one little boy in particular who pursued him wherever he sat, clutching at his face. The child’s mother, embarrassed, would fetch him away, whereupon he would wriggle and whine to be let loose till K did not know what to do or where to look. He suspected that the older girls laughed at him behind his back. He had never known how to behave with women. The Vrouevereniging ladies, perhaps because he was so thin, perhaps because they had decided he was simple, regularly allowed him to clean the soup-bucket: three time a week this made up his meal. He gave half his wages to Robert and carried the other half about in his pocket. There was nothing he wanted to buy; he never went to town. Robert still looked after him in various ways but spared him his speeches about the camp. ‘I have never seen anyone as asleep as you,’ Robert said. ‘Yes,’ replied K, struck that Robert too had seen it.

  The work around the bridge was finished. For two days the men were laid off, then the Council truck came to fetch them to do road grading. K lined up at the gate with the other men, but at the last moment declined to board the truck. ‘I’m sick, I can’t work,’ he told the guard. ‘Suit yourself, but you won’t be paid,’ said the guard.

  So K brought his mattress out and lay next to the hut in the shade with an arm over his face while the camp lived its life around him. He lay so still that the smaller children, having first kept their distance, next tried to rouse him, and, when he would not be roused, incorporated his body into their game. They clambered over him and fell upon him as if he were part of the earth. Still hiding his face, he rolled over and found that he could doze even with little bodies riding on his back. He found unexpected pleasure in these games. It felt to him that he was drawing health from the children’s touch; he was sorry when men from the Council arrived to spread lime in the latrine pits and they rushed off to watch.

  Through the fence K spoke to the guard: ‘Can I go out?’

  ‘I thought you were sick. This morning you told me you were sick.’

  ‘I don’t want to work. Why do I have to work? This isn’t a jail.’

  ‘You don’t want to work but you want other people to feed you.’

  ‘I don’t need to eat all the time. When I need to eat, I’ll work.’

  The guard sat in his deckchair on the porch of the tiny guardhouse with his rifle leaning at his side against the wall. He smiled into the distance.

  ‘So can you open the gate?’ said K.

  ‘The only way to leave is with the work party,’ said the guard.

  ‘And if I climb the fence? What will you do if I climb the fence?’

  ‘You climb the fence and I’ll shoot you, I swear to God I won’t think twice, so don’t try.’

  K caressed the wire as if weighing the risk.

  ‘Let me tell you something, my friend,’ said the guard, ‘for your own good, because you’re new here. If I let you out now, in three days you’ll be back pleading to be let in. I know. In three days. You’ll be standing at the gate here with tears in your eyes pleading with me to let you back. Why do you want to run away? You’ve got a home here, you’ve got food, you’ve got a bed. You’ve got a job. People are having a hard time out there in the world, you’ve seen it, I don’t need to tell you. For what do you want to join them?’

  ‘I don’t want to be in a camp, that’s all,’ said K. ‘Let me climb the fence and go. Turn your back. Nobody will notice I’m gone. You don’t even know how many people you’ve got here.’

  ‘You climb the fence and I’ll shoot you dead, mister. No hard feelings. I’m just telling you.’

  The next morning K lay in bed while the other men went to work. Later he walked over to the gate again. The same guard was on duty. He and K talked about football. ‘I’ve got diabetes,’ said the guard. ‘That’s the reason they never sent me north. Three years now I’ve been on paperwork, stores, guard duties. You think it’s bad in the camp, you try sitting out here twelve hours a day with nothing to do but look at the thornbushes. Still, I’ll tell you one thing, my friend, and this is the truth: the day I get orders to go north I walk out. They’ll never see me again. It’s not my war. Let them fight it, it’s their war.’

  He wanted to know about K’s mouth (‘Just curious,’ he said), and K told him. He nodded. ‘I thought so. But then I thought maybe someone cut you.’

  In the guardhouse he had a small paraffin-fuelled refrigerator. He brought out a lunch of cold chicken and bread and shared it with K, passing the food through the mesh. ‘We live pretty well, I suppose,’ he said, ‘cons
idering there’s a war on.’ He gave a sly smile.

  He spoke about the women in the camp, about the visits he and his colleague received at night. ‘They’re starved for sex,’ he said. Then he yawned and returned to his deckchair.

  The next morning K was shaken awake by Robert. ‘Get dressed, you’ve got to work,’ Robert said. K pushed his arm away. ‘Come on,’ said Robert, ‘they want everyone today, no excuses, no arguments, you’ve got to come.’ Ten minutes later K was standing outside the gate in the chilly early-morning wind, being counted, waiting for the truck. They were driven through the streets of Prince Albert and then out in the direction of Klaarstroom; they took a farm road past a sprawling shaded homestead and halted beside a lush field of lucerne where two police reservists with armbands and rifles stood waiting. As they climbed down they were handed sickles by a farm-worker who did not speak or meet their eyes. A tall man in freshly-pressed khaki slacks appeared. He held up a sickle. ‘You all know how to use a sickle,’ he called out. ‘You’ve got two morgen to cut. So get down to it!’

  Lined up three paces apart, the men began to work their way across the field, bending, gathering, cutting, taking half a step forward, in a rhythm that soon had K sweating and dizzy. ‘Cut clean, cut clean!’ bellowed a voice right behind him. K turned and faced the farmer in khaki; he could smell the sweet deodorant he used. ‘Where were you brought up, monkey?’ shouted the farmer. ‘Cut low, cut clean!’ He took the sickle from K’s hand, pushed him aside, gathered the next tuft of lucerne, and cut it clean and low. ‘See?’ he shouted. K nodded. ‘Then do it, man, do it!’ he shouted. K bent and sawed the next tuft off close to the earth. ‘Where do they pick up rubbish like that?’ he heard the farmer call to one of the reservists. ‘He’s half-dead! They’ll be digging up corpses for us next!’

  ‘I can’t go on!’ K gasped to Robert at the first break. ‘My back is breaking, every time I stand straight the world spins.’